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splitenz notes the first actions in the war against the Koobface botnet, taken on the heels of a comprehensive report (PDF) on the operations of the botnet and the criminal gang behind it. The researchers who analyzed Koobface are the same ones who brought Ghostnet to light. "Security researchers, working with law enforcement and Internet service providers, have disrupted the brains of the Koobface botnet.The computer identified as the command-and-control server used to send instructions to infected Koobface machines was offline late Friday (US Pacific time). Criminals behind the botnet made more than $US2 million in one year. Facebook accounts are used to lure victims to Google Blogspot pages, which in turn redirect them to Web servers that contain the malicious Koobface code. This action is only a stage in the war against Koobface."

Those people need to be kicked off the net until they can demonstrate that they can play nicely with the rest of us.

Although the BOFH in me would like that, thoroughly fining them would be enough. And if we really had a law that would allow to ban people from the net for incompetence, how long would it take that it would be abused to cut off government critical voices and the like? Or some evil corp gets the machine of a critical blogger infected and he's offline. Not with me.

Although with the "evil corp" example, I'd argue people should be keeping their systems safe from evil corporations as well as evil crime syndicates

Are you safe from someone secretly breaking into your house and infecting your machine? And do you really only use software that is 100% proven to be not exploitable on machines with net connection? C'mon, it has to stay reasonable. You can't expect everyone to go online with Linux Live CDs or from a VM that is reverted to a clean snapshot after the session. Which are about the only ways to really stay clean.

Why were people running a "flash player update" from a third party web site they got to from Facebook?

They are used to seeing the "you need the latest flash to view this content, click here to install it now". Sure when it's done the "normal" way the executable they randomly install will come from Adobe, but the entire process is begging for this tomfoolery.

To those who can't guess, I use Linux, won't install anything from Adobe and use noscript in the browser so forgive me if the "official" process has changed from the above idiotic implementation.

That is why I have been saying for ages the most common software like Flash, along with updates to drivers like NV and ATI, should come through Windows Update. But sadly every Joe Schmo company that didn't get included would scream "antitrust!". What I've found to work in the meantime with clueless users is simply tell them "If a site says you need to update Flash or Java or whatever, go here [ninite.com], put checkboxes on what you need, then run it". Ninite has all the most common like Flash, Silverlight,.NET, Java,

In my working experience, while inability to safely drive a vehicle or properly operate machinery is cause enough for firing, I have YET to see anyone fired from a job due to their inability to properly is a computer. Even if using one is ESSENTIAL to their job. Even if their reckless usage causes actual damages.

I can't see how responsible computer use will get to be expected in the home user world when businesses don't even expect their employees to properly use them.

Considering that we have graphics cards potentially on the way to being hacked so that you can't even be sure of the URL after checking the address bar, I think it's high time to stop blaming the victim and start calling these "separators of fools and their money" what they really are.

Thieves, cheaters, hackers, and most of all, terrorists.

Thieves because they steal, cheaters because they happily break the same rules that the rest of us are required to follow, hackers because of how they draft our machines

In particular because vigilantes have a bad reputation when it comes to correctly identifying targets and having a low occurrence of collateral damage. You get people who very much have the crusader mentality who get convinced of their own righteousness and infallibility. It leads to problems, it leads to innocents getting caught up on a large scale. Whenever you ahve to start up with "The ends justify the means," it generally means that they in fact don't.

However, if no viable alternative exists it's the lesser of two evils. A functioning police system and judiciary is a luxury and a means to an end, not a moral cause in and of itself. Spam and botnets currently lie mostly outside of the reach of the law, so if something is to be done about it it's going to be done by private forces. It's not so much a slippery slope as a slippery ladder, stretching back to before the first societies arose. And we still haven't found the bastard that soaped it up.

If you receive a notice of high bandwidth usage after a pattern of never going over a specific amount in a month. Whats your problem?

Profiling of bandwidth use would be a very good tool. And I feel completely legitimate. Your a 68 year old parent who is using 40 gig a month of bandwidth. This is after a pattern over several years of only 1 gig a month. You think that shouldn't be questioned???

And based on your snotty response to the previous person. Yes, I expect you to flame me. Go for it, I'm waiting wi

If we're not willing to us a "no holds barred" approach to attacking the spam bot issue, well, you better just get used to more and more spam.

By fighting fire with fire you risk disrupting the whole internet; spam is nothing compare to the shit you could unleash by doing so. The worst than happen when spam cross my filter is that I have to press flag as spam, considering the trouble caused, this problem does not deserve anymore resources than it currently has.

The worst than happen when spam cross my filter is that I have to press flag as spam, considering the trouble caused, this problem does not deserve anymore resources than it currently has.

It's much worse than that. Spam accounts for more than 90% of email traffic arriving at servers. There is also much more to malware than spam. Don't lose track of the fact that bots are computers controlled by criminals. There are probably hundreds of millions of them.

The researchers took down three C&C servers (yay) but this doesn't get to the crux of the problem. We've been hijacking C&C's for decades; Malware authors are just moving to a P2P model (e.g. Stuxnet). These researchers should figure out how to stop the mass FTP compromises, or advise Google and Facebook on how to prevent their sites from being used as a platform for these attacks. Maybe then we could start solving this Malware problem...